And the angle of the windows means the reflections would all be the darkest part of the room, the pit, so the back (which is the forward...) could be brightly lit without interfering with the view... okay, I'm convinced.
To each their own. Some are more scientifically-minded or engineering-minded than I am, and that's ok. I'm ultimately going to do what's prettier rather than what's scientifically plausible, as I am an artist through and through. I don't mind some push and pull from the readers of this thread, as I take every bit of feedback into consideration. But at the end of the day, I'm going to do what makes me happiest. Christopher's opinions are as welcome as anyone else's in this thread
Beautiful lounge! I love how those plants look there, make it look a lot more inviting and less 70's. Perhaps those glass panels are coated with something that increase the perceived brightness of objects directly perpendicular to them; and as they are placed at an angle, the nacelles and impulse crystal don't get that increase? Thus allowing for good stargazing without tripping over something. Or perhaps there's a light switch somewhere hahaha.
There was a vague reference to something like that in the VOY episode Counterpoint, mentioning "the polarisation axis of the windows"
The script for the scene as-shot was finalized by Jon Povill on October 12th, and shot the next day on the 13th. At least, it was scheduled for the 13th. I need to get back to USC to look at the editor's script in Bob Wise's papers to confirm, but they're obviously shut down for a while. But even before then, Paramount blocked access to the Trek materials in his collection before I was to go back last month.
As long as it's adjustable so that it dims if anything really bright passes into view, like a nearby sun or a photon torpedo explosion. Long ago, when playing around with starship design for my own science fiction, I figured that windows onto space would have to be able to selectively amplify starlight and dim other light sources like planets or ship hulls at the same time in order to achieve the kind of effect you see onscreen -- since amplifying the light enough to see the stars would also brighten any lighted portion of the hull, or the daylit side of a planet you were orbiting, to blinding intensity. I tried to figure out what could be going on inside the windows so that it could dim or completely block out a dangerously bright light while also allowing the stars to remain visible. The tricky part is that it would have to work from every viewing angle. I had the idea of a liquid crystal layer that, when sufficiently bright light struck it, would polarize its crystals in the direction of the light rays passing through, so that the light would be blocked for viewers from any interior angle. Thinking about it now, though, I'm not sure that would work for anything wider than a point source, since then you'd have rays coming in at multiple angles. Maybe something that worked akin to a hologram would do the trick -- and I mean a hologram in the literal sense of the word, a 2D surface encoding 3D information, not the sci-fi sense of a free-standing volumetric image. Wow, that's strange. I wonder why they'd do that.
Given how pattern and imaging recognition neural networks work today, it could be entirely possible (if a little convoluted) for the glasses to "know" what to amplify with data from both the external sensors and from cameras tracking the eye movements of the people inside the lounge. Screens that show different outputs from different angles already exist today, the trick would be to be able to do so tracking movements in real time, and showcasing the results on top of a transparent, curved surface.
At a certain point, though, is there enough enhancement going on in the window to make having it actually be made of transparent material totally redundant since it's just an elaborate screen? It's a shame we've seen viewports broken in Trek before and know they're actually made out of transparent material; it'd be a fun fanwank to suggest all the windows we see on the inside of the ship are elaborate holographic displays, with matching holographic displays on the outside of the ship because, I don't know, humans are actually huge exhibitionists and are psychologically disturbed by the idea of looking at something that can't look back at them. That sounds like some grade-A '70s Roddenberry claptrap. And if we say all the windows are fake on both sides, we solve every ship-scaling issue we've ever had!
Very interesting. Good suggestions. I wasn't aware such screens existed. How do they work? That's just what I was about to say. It doesn't have to be transparent at all, and it's safer if it isn't. Simpler if it's just a virtual window, a computer-processed 3D image that amplifies the dim lights, ameliorates the bright ones, intensifies the colors, etc. Incidentally, way back when I was imagining starships for my fiction and wondering how their windows would work, I did envision the starship bridge having a front window that could project "screen" insets onto its surface, because I thought that would be cool and interesting. Now that Star Trek is actually doing exactly what I imagined, though, I'm older and wiser and I think it's dumb.